Wednesday, May 07, 2008

Mojo on N800

Recently a port of Ubuntu for ARM processors was released. The project is named Mojo, and currently they've released distributions called Frisky (Feisty based) and Grumpy (Gutsy based). The first thought I had was to make it work on a real hardware. This time I chose my Nokia N800 tablet.

At the beginning I made a simple system with debootstrap. I was using a qemu based ARM system to install debootstrap to create the system for a specific directory. For simplicity I put resulted contents from the directory to a MMC card. I just made one EXT3 partition and copied (or really I used tar) everything there. I put the MMC card inside my N800 and used flasher to select boot from MMC. Booted and nothing seems to happen. Weird.

First I thought there's some problem with my system. After a thought find out that my system might boot but it won't show anything on the screen. The solution was to follow instructions how to disable boot splash screen and enable console on framebuffer. Now I was able to boot the device, startup messages from kernel begun to run, and finally the system from the MMC booted and show it's login prompt. Fortunately there was no keyboard available so I was just pressing the enter key to see that system really reacts for something.

Next I'd like to try to make real system working on the device. Meaning X and some apps running. Also want to try this process on my FIC Neo1973. But the greatest thing is that now I can use Ubuntu as my system on the ARM. Previously I was using Debian, but Ubuntu brings some benefit. I will certainly continue to play with these repositories and probably get something nice working...

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I'm waiting for X and friends... =)